On a spring afternoon a call came in from a very exasperated client. “Why is my excel coming to a crashing halt? Is 120,000+ rows too many in a spreadsheet? How come it keeps locking up!” He spoke with the unmistakable tone that indicated his computer was about to take flight from his second story window.
The sheet was only 17MB in size with about 120,000 rows, a few pivot tables, and no complex formulas. Every time he would insert a new empty column on the main sheet Excel would come to a screeching halt. After about 10 minutes the operation would complete. Turning off automatic calculations and starting excel with the /safe switch resulted in no change of behavior.
After some creative Google searches I came across a post about Google Desktop slowing down excel. With nothing to to lose Google Desktop was un-installed and miraculously the insert column took 1 second instead of 1o minutes!
Further examination revealed another blog posting that further explained the underlying problem.
Ironic, isn’t it? Searching Google revealed Google Desktop to be the culprit of the slow down.